证明树上多智能体路径规划在各类目标下均是难解问题。
On the Hardness of Optimal Motion on Trees
- 通过栈重排难题建立统一归约框架
- 首次证明树上两色佩比尔运动的复杂性
- 适用于路径规划、堆栈重排等基础模型
本文提出一个简洁框架,解决了树结构上多智能体路径规划(MAPF)在距离、完工时间和流时间三种标准目标下的复杂性问题,涵盖标记与着色两种变体。在标记情况下,各智能体有唯一目标;在着色情况下,同色智能体可互换。尽管许多MAPF变体已被证明为难解,但树上的若干基本情形长期未决。本文证明:在所有三种目标下,标记与二色MAPF在树上均为NP难。特别地,解决了经典佩比尔运动问题——每次移动一个棋子至相邻空位,目标是最小化总移动次数。该模型虽为最基础离散运动模型之一,其在树上的复杂性已悬置数十年。此外,对二色佩比尔运动,首次给出任意图类上的难解性结果,且两色即达到紧界。所有结论均源于栈重排问题的难解性,该问题本身亦被证明为NP难。值得注意的是,该关联使复杂性结果可在极简树结构——细分星形树上成立。这些成果揭示了多个基础运动模型间的共同可计算障碍,统一并强化了既有难解性结果。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper presents a simple framework that settles the complexity of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) on trees across standard objectives--distance, makespan, and flowtime--for both labeled and colored variants. In MAPF, agents occupy the vertices of a graph and must move to target vertices without collisions while optimizing a given objective. In the labeled case, the agents are distinct and have respective targets; in the colored case, agents of the same color are interchangeable. While many MAPF variants are known to be intractable, several basic cases on trees have remained open. We prove NP-hardness on trees for both labeled and 2-colored MAPF under all three objectives. In particular, we resolve the classical Pebble Motion problem, where one pebble moves at a time to an adjacent empty vertex and the goal is to minimize the total number of moves. Despite being one of the most basic discrete motion models, its complexity on trees had remained open for several decades. Moreover, for colored Pebble Motion, we give the first hardness result on any graph class, already with two colors, which is tight. All of these results are established through the hardness of Stack Rearrangement, itself posed as an open problem, which asks to optimally rearrange items stored in stacks, and which we also prove to be NP-hard. Notably, the connection to stacks yields hardness already on very simple trees--subdivided stars--across all problems. Together, these results reveal a common tractability barrier that permeates several fundamental motion models, thereby unifying and strengthening prior hardness results.
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